Mobile data access devices make it simple and affordable to access corporate and personal data while out of the office. Software allowing for such access is becoming a standard feature on a variety of mobile devices and platforms: BREW, Pocket PCs, Smartphones, Symbian-based phones, PDAs and Internet browsers.
There are approximately 35 million workers that make up the ‘mobile workforce,’ that is, individuals who carry out all or substantial portions of their job away from a physical office setting. With the increasing number of on-the-go workers, electronic mail continues to be, arguably, the most important business application. As a result, this workforce—as well as the casual individual user—has an inherent need for mobile access to their electronic mail and other data.
Despite an ever-increasing need for access to electronic mail and data, costs of ownership for mobile data access remain a barrier. The issue is no longer whether mobile data access is a necessity but whether it can be deployed and managed in an effective manner.
While cost is an obvious concern in equipping the workforce with the means for accessing data on-the-go, the implementation, development, integration and management of mobile data access solutions are of paramount interest. Despite mobile devices becoming a staple in personal and commercial enterprise, rapidly evolving changes such as number portability, mergers in the telecommunications and software industry and the lack of any one particular technical standard in the mobile device technological space, make providing support for a wide-array of mobile devices an important, albeit difficult, issue with regard to accessing data from a mobile device. The lack of internal expertise, the immaturity of standards, the complexity of integration, device limitations and application development have all been explicitly recognized as barriers to adopting mobile devices for providing access to data while, for example, out of the office or away from a personal desktop computer.
Increased user-flexibility—user familiarity amongst a variety of different devices and/or platforms—may be provided by device-neutral software as is described in the present application. For example, a single application (e.g., a notepad or an e-mail application) could be run on various mobile devices. The user-flexibility proffered by device-neutral software helps to improve IT-familiarity and expertise in that IT personnel need only become familiar with one software application (or suite of applications) instead of a particularized application for each individual platform environment and/or mobile device. Such device and platform neutrality increases end-user adoption of mobile device technologies in their fullest sense thereby better ensuring a return on investment.
But as adoption and pervasiveness of mobile devices and operating platforms increase, so does technological fragmentation within the marketplace. That is, with the increasing availability of differing mobile devices and operating platforms, there is an increase in disjunct technologies and methodologies that evidence an increasing need for standardization. Until there exists an overarching technological standard adopted by or at least a significant portion of the marketplace, developing device- and/or platform-neutral applications, as are taught in the present application, for mobile devices makes application development and testing less of a colossal task for software engineers while ensuring higher quality and better overall design.
Device-neutral user interfaces, like those described in the present application, will play a critical role in mobile device development. Such interfaces must not only provide access to mission critical data but also deal with the realities of variations in screen size, pixel density, aspect ratio and screen use availability amongst devices; limited memory on a mobile device; limited processing power; general quirkiness between platforms; and, perhaps most noticeable to the end-user, the general lack of space for interacting with the mobile device (e.g., keyboard space for text-entry and display space for viewing data). A keyboard, mouse or even a stylus are normally not available for such interaction in a traditional wireless or mobile device. Not only is input difficult, so is viewing a display rendering information. This is especially true when the mobile device happens to also be a cellular telephone.
Engineers have previously been forced to deal with the fact that present-day prior art interfaces are not be suitable for more than one primary set of devices. For example, PDAs utilize a stylus and touch-screen whereas cellular phones may utilize a keypad and/or five-way navigation. If an engineer is satisfied with limiting an interface to a particular type of environment (e.g., platform or device), the engineer must still deal with the nuances of particular device manufacturers (e.g., a Palm PDA versus a Nokia cell phone) and, in some instances, particular device models (e.g., PALM VIIx and Nokia 7110).
An engineer is still, in many instances, limited by the fact that he or she must pre-generate static interfaces or multiple permutations of the interface as they pertain to a particular device or platform family. This results in delays for delivery of applications and increased costs in research and development, which inevitably result in increased costs for the end-user.
There is, therefore, a need in the art for a user interface that is neutral with regard to operating platform and device wherein one client interface will work on multiple platforms and devices.
It should be noted, in the course of this disclosure, that while a device (e.g., hardware) and platform (e.g., software) are recognized as distinct—albeit related—entities, any reference to a device or a platform should be considered inclusive of both. Similarly, any reference to the neutrality of an interface, in general, should be interpreted as neutrality as to both a device and a platform.
Further, it should be noted that any disclosed device or platform-neutral user interface is not dependent on the presentation or transmission of communications data (e.g., electronic mail, calendar, SMS) or utilization of user data (e.g., data stored on a desktop).